The New Nurture Is Already Developing

[Eric the Green]

(04-28-2022, 08:46 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(04-27-2022, 05:36 AM)galaxy Wrote: This article is the highest-profile, but there's been a lot of discussion of this lately, whether in film, television, and literature, or on social media. Society is already in the mindset that will raise a new generation of Prophets/Idealists.

https://www.vox.com/culture/23025832/eve...urning-red


I have mixed feelings about it. For people my age it really does feel like we are the generation that will correct all of the failings of our own parents, but that's what the GIs and Silents thought too, and look how the Boomers turned out. Not well.

There's a real comfort that comes with knowing the cyclical nature of modern history, but there's also a nihilism and hopelessness that comes with it, knowing that it's impossible to truly "fix" any problem. The fix will create new problems, to be fixed by a later generation, which will in the process recreate the original problems. I guess that's the thing I'm struggling with. There's something really beautiful in it, but it's also so hopeless.

Prophets/Idealists have their childhood memories formed after the Crisis is resolved. The five-year gap (1860-1865) between the first Missionary Idealists and the end of the Civil War may be longer than the gap between the first Boom Idealists (1943) and V-J Day because of the difference in availability of mass media. Or could it be that some Crisis characteristics remained until 1948 (Czechoslovak coup and the Berlin Airlift)? That could have ensured that the likes of Barbra Streisand are Silent and not Boom. 

We don't know when and how the current Crisis will resolve. I expect the presence of Donald Trump to be a warning to parents (now Millennial and Homeland) to not raise narcissists. When he is gone, then so will be the warning. It could be that inexpensive suburban housing (at least for white Boomers) ensured that Boom kids would have room in which to establish some individuality. We may be unable to have enough cheap single-family housing to create a Boom-like Idealist generation. On the other hand, Boomer achievements haven't been so great on the whole. Politics? We had the passable Clinton, the awful Dubya, and the horrific Trump. Scientific achievement? Rather sparse. Business? The cult of the executive responsible to shareholders to humiliate workers, crush competition, and gouge customers -- pardon me if I vomit.

By August 1944, any fear of an Axis victory was gone. All that mattered was to wipe out the pure evil of genocide and enslavement as well as the inhuman ideologies of reckless and amoral leaders in Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo. The greatest danger to American democracy in America isn't some figures easy to lampoon in an American comic book for their exotic evil. The bad guys in this Crisis are Americans, people who believe in nothing but their own power, indulgence, and gain, and should those people prove mortal, their over-indulged kids who have never struggled for anything more difficult than some math trick (if they liked those).   

Music? OK -- I doubt that anyone would compare G F Handel to Jimi Hendrix even if there is a house in London dedicated to both of them (they were neighbors of a sort, living in opposite sides of a duplex -- about 225 years apart!)



 

Handel obviously knew nothing of his future neighbor, and it is not clear that Jimi Hendrix knew what went on in the past on the other side of 25 Brook street in London.  Whether you prefer Handel or Hendrix is a matter of taste.

The Handel video is invisible. Which Handel piece did you try to post? Performer? Or was it Hendrix, or what were you trying to post?